LANDSCAPE FILM: A Systems View of Nature

During the 1960s American physicist Edward Lorenz turned his attention to the seemingly mundane field of weather prediction. Devising a mathematical formula known as the Lorenz Attractor, he mapped the course of chaos itself. These formulations, aided by the newfound number crunching capabilities of the computer, gave rise to chaos theory, a new science of the unpredictable.

The study of complex systems like the weather has since been seen to have applications in all fields of the life sciences and humanities. The list of applications is enormous, ranging from family therapy to kinship systems, from cardiology to communication theory, from stock market fluctuations to power outages. Systems theory, a science that looks at process and change in response to input from the environment, sees living systems and social systems in terms of the dynamic relation between the parts and the whole. One of the most interesting applications of systems theory was in the biological sciences, where, in the second half of the twentieth century, a new non-dualistic definition of mind was emerging.

According to Gregory Bateson, whose Steps to an Ecology of Mind remains a seminal text in the application of systems thought: "Implicit in systems theory is the expectation that all units containing completed circuits will show mental characteristics. The mind, in other words, is immanent, in the circuitry."[1] Bateson's writings suggest that cognition is part of all living systems whether man-made or otherwise.

In his book The Hidden Connections, FritjofCapra argues:

At all levels of life, beginning with the simplest cell, mind and matter, process and structure, are inseparably connected... The Santiago Theory (Humberto Mantura and Francisco Varla) proposes a concept of cognition in which the mind as a separate 'thinking thing' is abandoned in favor of a model in which mind is not separate but part of a process, the process of cognition which characterizes the existence of life... Cognition as understood in the Santiago Theory is associated with all levels of life... and... consciousness is a special kind of cognitive process which emerges when cognition reaches a certain level of complexity... The relationship between mind and brain, therefore, is one between process and structure..."[2]

In this world view the phenomenon of consciousness is not separate from nature, as it is in Cartesian scientific thought, but is instead an essential part of all biological processes. This new understanding of nature focuses on the relationship between the parts and the dynamic processes where the flow of energy gives rise to new forms, placing human beings and human consciousness back within the complex fabric of nature and not on the outside like some disembodied brain looking in.

Around the same time that Lorenz's ideas were transforming the sciences a radical transformation was also taking place in the arts, where the relatively new field of film and video was beginning to be seen as a radical alternative to the traditional disciplines of painting and sculpture. In North America the focus of experimental film-making appeared to be shifting way from the Surrealist and Romantic traditions of the early European avant-garde. In an attempt to categorize the ground breaking work of filmmakers such as Michael Snow, George Landow, and Paul Sharits, the American film historian P. Adams Sitney formulated the following definition, which would characterize an entirely new direction in the history of film:

The structural film insists on its shape, and what content it has is minimal and subsidiary to the outline. Four characteristics of the structural film are its fixed camera position (fixed from the viewer's perspective), the flicker effect, loop printing and re-photography off the screen?[3]

In the UK, where the availability of printing and processing equipment at the London Film-Makers Co-op further facilitated this materials based practice, both single screens and multi-screen Expanded Cinema works of this period were entirely original departures from all that had gone before. However, the biggest difference between the two camps was of a more philosophical nature. In the UK structural filmmakers rejected the expressionistic or transcendental elements still evident in the films of their American colleagues in favour of a more politicized model, rooted in the Kino Eye Manifesto. Inspired by the political upheavals of the 1920s, early Soviet film-makers rejected the theatrical illusions of the cinema, condemned the passive consumption of filmic illusion and called for a materialist practice that would inspire a conscious and critically aware audience.

Following that tradition, in 1976 Peter Gidal described the structural materialist film in these words: "The structuring aspects and the attempt to decipher the structure and anticipate/re-correct it, to clarify and analyze the production process of the specific image at any specific moment, are the root concern of Structural/Materialist Film."[4]

Structural filmmakers on both sides of the Atlantic began experimenting at that time with landscape imagery; however, the landscape in these so-called landscape films was of secondary importance. As in mainstream narrative cinema and Renaissance painting, where nature is the backdrop to the human drama, the emphasis was primarily on human activity, in this case the film-making process. It seemed to me that in these works the processes of film arid the processes in nature were still split along Cartesian lines.

My love of landscape and my fascination with the scientific investigation of complex systems pushed my practice in a different direction. What interested me about both structural film and complex systems was the possibility of creating work based on the interconnectedness of these systems, where landscape was not secondary to film-making process or film-making process to landscape, but process and structure, as revealed in both, could carry information and communicate ideas.

Writing about British experimental films in the summer of 1976, Deke Dusinberre made the following observation about the structural approach to landscape film-making:

The significance of [structural] landscape films arises from the fact that they assert the illusionism of cinema through the sensuality of landscape imagery, and simultaneously assert the material nature of the representational process which sustains the illusionism. It is the interdependence of those assertions which makes the films remarkable - the "shape" and "content" interact as a systematic whole.[5]

In my films there is a further significance to this interplay between landscape and film making technology. As Peter Wollen explained:

The techniques developed by Welsby made it possible for there to be a direct "indexical" registration of natural phenomena on film. Natural processes were no longer simply recorded from the outside, as objective observation; they could be made to participate in the scheme of observation itself.[6]

In Seven Days, for example, the shape of the film is the result of the collaboration between, on the one hand, the filmmaker and the equipment, and, on the other, the rotation of the planet and the weather.

The camera is aligned with the sun and pans at the same speed as the earth, recording one frame per second from sunrise to sunset. The in-camera editing is governed by cloud cover, by whether the sun is out or concealed by cloud. The final shape of the film is a consequence of the interaction between the predictable mechanistic nature of technology and the chance-like qualities of the natural world.

A similar theme emerges in Park Film, where the overall pacing was determined by the flow of people along a busy park pathway in London. The flow is determined by the commuter clock (morning and evening rush hours) and by the weather (on a stormy day walking home across the park is considerably less attractive than catching a bus). This is not so much a film about a park, or a record of the people passing through the park; the camera is not a passive observer, nor is it used as a surveillance device. Rather, in Park Film, the camera, like the passers-by who trigger its shutter, is an active participant in the interaction between a park and the city that surrounds it.

In both of these examples the overall shape of the films can be described as an emergent property, a result of the interaction between the cinematic process and the environment.

In the field of anthropology there is evidence to suggest that tool making and language both appeared around the same time in history and that it is possible that syntax was a product of more complex tool making procedures.[7] In my practice I find that the use of technology in both the films and the installations is inseparably connected to language. When I get the wind to crank the camera shutter or use a device to align the camera with the rotation of the earth I am dealing not only with tools but also with language, the language of abstract forms and material processes.

In all of my films and installations I use the simple structuring capabilities of moving image technologies, such as variable-frame rate, in-camera editing and multiple projection, in combination with natural phenomena such as wind and tides and the rotation of the planet, to produce works in which the relationship between mind, technology and nature is based not on control and exploitation but on cooperation and the interaction between the parts of a larger gestalt.

Notes

1 Bateson Gregory. Sacred Unity: Further Steps to an Ecology of Mind (New York:Harper Collins, 1991) p.260.

2 Capra, Fritjof. The Hidden Connections (New York: Anchor Books, 2002) pp. 37-38.

3 Sitney, P. Adams. Visionary Film: The American Avant-Garde 1943-1978 2nd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1974) p. 370.

4 Gidal, Peter. 'Theory and Definition of Structural/Materialist Film', Structural Film Anthology (London: BFI, 1976) p. 1.

5 Dusinberre, Deke. St. George in the Forest: The English Avant-Garde, Afterimage (London: Afterimage Publishing, Summer 1976) p. ii.

6 Woflen, Peter. Chris Welsby: Films/Photographs/Writings (Arts Council of Great Britain, 1981) p. 2.

7 Hewes, Gordon. A History of the Study of Language Origins and the Gestural Primacy Hypothesis. (1976) www.massey.ac.nz/~'alock/hbook/hewes.htm